TERRITORIAL AND PERSONAL LAW

Apart from Family Law, the rubric ‘Persons’ is of comparatively small importance in our law, since the law is territorial and every subject of the State is a citizen of it. If he is subject to disabilities, e.g. is a minor or a lunatic or a convict, this has nothing to do with his citizenship. And a domiciled alien is, so far as the private law is concerned, in much the same position as a citizen. Even a merely resident or visiting alien, with a foreign domicile, will rarely find, at least for acts inter vivos, that the law for him is very different from that under which his citizen neighbour lives. The Roman classical law presents at first sight a very different picture. The law was personal. There were of course many slaves, who were rightless and, so far as private law is concerned, dutiless. Moreover, not every free subject was a citizen. A man might be a member of a Latin colony or of a peregrine community: he might be a Junian Latin or a dediticius. It would be beyond the present purpose to go into these differences, but it may be pointed out that while in the family law and in the law of succession they are of very great importance, they amount in the rest of the private law to very little indeed.